Forbes – Giovanni Rodriguez
“As my followers on this blog know, I’ve been spending an increasing amount of my time these days writing about diversity in tech. For most stories, I follow a narrow definition of diversity, focused mostly on stories about gender, ethnicity, and age. But increasingly, my attention – if not my writing – has been moving toward a more comprehensive view: diversity in thinking. So it was with great interest that I responded to a pitch from a Silicon Valley org called the El Camino Project that’s looking to augment pre-college curricula with culturally relevant musical content designed for Hispanics. For at least three reasons, the El Camino Project generally – and an app it is planning to bring to US schools specifically — is timely. First, as noted by a recent report commissioned by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, students with an education that is “arts rich” tend to achieve better outcomes (higher rate of acceptance into college; better performance in school; greater success in careers today — especially in tech — where creative thinking is so highly sought). But with the poorest schools cutting arts education these days, Hispanics are among those receiving the most “arts poor” education. Why? More than 33% of Hispanic students live below the poverty line.”(more)